WTF! Random Cracked/Exploding Bottle?!

>Here< is a crappy quality surveillance video showing a bottle of '09 North Coast Old Stock Cellar Reserve doing the same thing. Clean break at the base.



Isolated incident, luckily, but still sucks that it was one of the most expensive bottles of beer in the store at the time.

 

Watch out for corks popping on their own, too! At least once you uncage it. A friend and l both uncaged bottles of Brux and the corks shot 30 feet in the air, the first missing me by a half-inch. Always wear safety glasses when in the presence of beer!

 

I take it you do, or have worked in a brewery? Should we the consumers be inspecting our bottles for "checks" while purchasing? I think I would rather that, than ruined clothing or a pierced out eyeball.

 

Glass bottle factory. (also did customer relations work for the factory at breweries,distilleries and other botteling facilities) Most if not all small checks that have already got passed the initial QC would be very hard to detect by the layman. The easiest way to see them requires the bottle to be empty too so once it's filled that takes in store inspection even more unpractical. Most cases the defect is discovered on the inspection line at the factory and all glassware with the same mold number is discarded (recycled) until that mold# passes QC again. I don't worry about it and I've seen more bottle defects than most people will see bottles in their lifetime. To give you an idea of the production speed of a glass bottle plant we had one line of Michelob bottles that produced over 500 cases of bottles an hour running 24/7 nearly 365 days a year and we were the smallest provider of those bottles to A-B in Calif. Here is a pretty good (but long) article if you are interested:http://www.emhartglass.com/files/TW0738-Causes&Remedies_Secured_1.pdf

 

Room temp sours will do that, oh yeah.

 

Had this happen with a 'Hair of the dog'. Weird thing was that I flew back from Portland with it wrapped in my suitcase and it was fine. Three days later it EXPLODED and sent shards of glass 30 feet. The bottle didn't just separate. It sent a hundred lethal shards in all directions. I'm still finding pieces of glass a month later.

 

If the glass breaks along a line, it's usually from a faulty bottle. If it explodes, that means the pressure inside the bottle built up past the tolerance of the glass, but there was no weak spot, which would have given first, causing a break along a line. Exploding bottles, as opposed to bottles that crack along a line, can be caused by a number of factors. For example, if the brewery primed the beer before bottling, but the priming sugar wasn't mixed sufficiently through the whole batch, that could result in too much sugar winding up in select few bottles, and the CO2 produced during post-bottling fermentation could cause an abnormally high build up of pressure. This tends to happen more with homebrewing, esp. if the homebrewer is new to the bottling process. It's much less common at the commercial level, but it does occasionally happen.

 

I had a bottle of the 2013 Stone IRS explode on me last weekend. My girlfriend bought it for me while I was at work, kept it at room temp as it was purchased. I got home a few hours later, inspected it and set it back on the peninsula in my kitchen.

Girlfriend woke me up the next morning because the bottle had exploded. There were splatter marks on the floor to both sides, as well as glass shards as far away as 5 feet. The bulk of the bottle was in a pile of pieces on the floor, but the beer was pooled on the countertop.

While I did shed a tear cleaning it up, I was fortunate enough to find more bottles locally so i picked up 2. Also fortunate that my girlfriend and i were sleeping at the time of explosion so there was no risk of injury.

I posted something to twitter tagging stone in the process, but never heard anything from them on the issue.

 

I had a bottle of 3fs Moloko explode on the way home in the back seat. Luckily it was in s Svedka Vodka box the store had provided because of the haul I had, so there was no mess in the seat.

 

I had a bottle of FFF Deesko explode in my cellar yesterday. I got it last weekend from the brewery, put in in my closet on the floor with a few other bottles, we have had consistent temps in our house all week...I smelled beer when I walked in the room only to find the neck of the bottle shattered, glass everywhere, cap still attached to the broken glass, thankfully not much beer spilled.

 

Had this happen with a bottle of FFF BA Alpha Klaus with Raspberries - I was not amused.

 

Yikes yeah I'd be more upset about that

 

lmao.....

 

It just happened to me with a bottle of Stone Bourbon Barrel Aged Arrogant Bastard.



It was in my garage and the temp was 100 earlier today and about 86 now.

Blew the bottom right off

 

Lesson of the day: store your bottles upside-down.

 

And out of 100 degree heat

 

I had a Fou leak on me, noticed it digging through cellar. It was a slow leak, so i put it in the fridge and drank it later that night. Tasted fine.